JeremyBlum.com

This is a project that I’ve been working on on-and-off for over a year now. A while back, a friend got me this robotic claw kit from thinkgeek, basically to make fun of my prosthetics research.  It’s simple enough…A wired controller is connected to the claw and has a few levers for eliciting movement from the arm’s various motors.  As you might expect, I got bored with picking up blocks rather quickly.  I instantly had the idea to pick up blocks remotely!  Oh what fun that would be!  To accomplish this I employed one of my favorite microcontrollers, the parallax propeller. Admittedly, the propeller is overkill for this project, but it’s what I happened to have on hand–It has 8 cores and I am only using one, but this is only v1 of the claw, and I hope to take better advantage of this chip in the future.  The propeller chip communicates with a small web server (also sold by parallax) via a serial connection.  I’ve even setup a network webcam, and embedded the feed in the control webpage, so I can easily control the claw from anywhere in the world!

Read on for pictures, source-code, a video, and a walk-through of the system!

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As we prepare for our final circuit boards to arrive, we have been fine tuning our programming. Today involved trying to learn assembly language, a programming form that allows for faster execution of code, but is signifigantly more difficult to write correctly. Some aspects of our project execute a bit too slowly, and we believe that changing to assembly code may fix that.

Work on the guitar has been continuing at a steady rate. What has been going on:

• We’ve installed the d-sub connection into the side of the guitar
• We’ve installed a switch above the whammy bar that will turn autonomous mode on or off
• We’re still working on trying to mold the buttons so we can create some transparent replacements with LEDs inside
• Code tweaking. We’re really close to fixing the issue where star power notes tend to not get strummed
• More code tweaking. The level of software post-processing has gotten so heavy that we are moving some of the code from an interpreted language to assembly code in order to speed it up
• We’ve finally finished the computer design of the circuit boards, and we sent them out to get printed professionally today. We should be able to start soldering on the components by early next week when we get the boards.

Here are some pics of all the stuff I’m talking about :)